Inching Back To Sane: A Memoir of Mental Illness

By Leif Gregersen

I am a 44-year-old author of fiction and non-fiction. The first book I wrote was "Through the Withering Storm" which was about my life with bipolar disorder, a crippling mental illness that seemed to take everything I loved in life away from me. I lost friends, relationships, the comforts of a family and my grip on reality because of this illness. It crept up on me slowly as I was growing up for many years and my life was nearly impossible to manage andI was severely depressed a lot, but when I was 18 I got very ill and was committed to a hospital four times. I wrote down the story of this phase of my life in the book, "Through the Withering Storm". When I finished the book and got it to print, there were a lot of questions from people as to what happened after, and others wanted to see more of what experiencing the illness was like, so I wrote this book, "Inching Back To Sane." When released from a hospital after an extended visit, there is a journey that takes place, a long and arduous one, but thankfully for me, not an impossible one. The concept of a long journey of slow steps to get one's life together was where I got the title of this book from, and I hope it can bring relief from suffering and a new understanding of what mental illness survivors go through. I have to admit the book as it sits isn't as perfect as I would like it to be, but many people have said it still gives a clear message of what I went through. This book won the 2014 New York Book Festival's 'Honorable Mention' in the category of memoirs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leif Gregersen
• Release date: Jan 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310694318

Leif Gregersen

I have been driven to become the best possible writer I could be from a young age. At six I got a toy typewriter and I would spend my allowance on things like a thesaurus or blank paper to draw and make stories on. Every day after school in elementary I remember walking a mile to visit the library and take out books on mouse detectives or invisible ten year-olds. I remember a book I read in grade five about a young girl whose mother refused to leave their high-rise apartment. I have had some success with poetry and magazine articles, but what I really want to do is write books, and I have completed two. One is already available in many places and the other needs some fine-tuning. The second book I wrote is a novel about life in British Columbia in a small town not unlike the one I grew up in, though I grew up in Alberta. At the moment I make my living setting up stages for rock concerts and I get a small disability pension which I hope to one day cancel and live only by my own means. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder/manic depression at the age of 18 and had a very hard time until I came to accept that diagnosis as fact. For any more I guess you have to buy the book!

Book preview

INCHING BACK TO SANE

A SEQUEL TO:

THROUGH THE WITHERING STORM

By

Leif Gregersen

Copyright © 2014 by Leif Gregersen

All Rights Reserved.

This ebook is sold for the reader’s personal enjoyment and is not to be reproduced or resold in any format.

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed herein are fictitious and are not based on any real persons living or dead.

Other works by Leif Gregersen:

Through the Withering Storm: A Brief History of a Mental Illness

Green Mountain Road and Selected Stories

Poems From Inside Me

First White of Winter Poems

The Base Jumpers and Selected Stories

Check out my website at http://www.edmontonwriter.com

Or my blog at: http://www.valhalla2014.wordpress.com

Or feel free to write to me at: [e-mail]

Special note from the author:

Writing this book took no small amount of time and effort. I had been wanting to sit down and encapsulate the years after I left Vancouver and my dreams of completing flight school, but for some time I just didn’t see the point. When I finally sat down and tried to do in this book what I had tried to in my first, I found that with a renewed sense of honesty and maturity it wasn’t at all as difficult as I thought it would be. I have many people to thank for this book getting to print, especially my mentor and friend, Richard Van Camp, an incredible author who, in a spiritual sense sits over my shoulder and watches me write each day. Sometimes when I talk about my past I get a little bitter, or at least I used to. I have been known to say my Dad was too strict and some have been known to tell me that he was the cause of my problems. The raw fact is that there were many times in my young life that I was incredibly proud of my Dad. He had been a fireman in the Danish National Service, he had been a huge supporter of such things as the Air Cadets and the Canadian National Institute for the blind. Moving away from home was one of the most difficult things I had to do, but I think if my Dad hadn’t put his foot down and forced me that my life would not be nearly as good as it is today. As I write these lines my last hospital visit, now 12 years in the past is barely on my mind and I am preparing to take the trip of a lifetime to ‘The Big Island" of Hawaii. To those who read this book, I hope it touches you, I hope it reaches you. For those who have Bipolar, I hope it comforts you and that it says nothing more than that sick people need Psychiatrists, they need medication compliance, and they, as I did, need to take life in baby steps. Thank you, dear reader, for making my writing dreams come true.

Leif Gregersen II

Chapter One

When I think back to the day I packed up all my stuff, gave away what I couldn’t carry, and left Vancouver for good, even though it was 20 years ago, sometimes I think that I would have been better off staying there. The reality was, though, that I was so ill that I wouldn’t have been able to take care of myself in a short amount of time. I had recently returned from a harrowing trip to California and I had been through quite a bit. My sister later told me I came back skinny as a cat, and I must have been, because for the first time in my young life my stomach was as flat as though I were an athlete.

I had left the Lion’s Gate Hospital in Vancouver with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia and enough delusions in my head to believe it was true. As a parting gift I was given a small amount of pills that were to be used to counteract the time-release medication, which had been administered by injection and would leave me a drooling mess for the next 30 days with very little effect on my illness. There was no wonder this happened, I was not a schizophrenic, I was in fact a sufferer of manic depression or bipolar disorder. When they had released me from the hospital, I went back to the hostel where I had lived just before being admitted to Lion’s Gate to wait out whatever time I could grasp before I would be sent back to a psychiatric ward again. It seemed as though it would be a short time before this happened, I was in an awful state of delusion and confusion. After paying a large portion of my monthly social services income to cover the costs of me not living there, but the staff not knowing I was gone, I paid what little I had left for a couple more weeks and hoped that I could somehow make it through to some type of improved state.

All the while I was in the hospital in Vancouver, I was getting worse and worse in the delusional aspect of my illness. The medication I had been given was simply not working. I remember when I was admitted to that hospital, I was so combative and paranoid I demanded to see the credentials of the doctor who was going to admit me. I ended up being wrestled down and given a powerful sedative. I woke up in a peaceful psychiatric ward, dressed in pajamas some hours later in the morning.

After I had gotten out of the hospital and had returned to where I had chosen to make my home, one day I was alone in my room and for some reason I believed the room had been bugged and all kinds of levels of authority were listening in. I started yelling out that I was to be taken aboard a spaceship and given a special tattoo signifying I was a pilot. I could hear people laughing at me and making jokes in the next room. One of them came to the door and asked me if I was okay and I answered, Oh, I’m just trying to get some records transferred. I wonder if he thought I was nuts or perhaps thought I had a cellular phone. It was funny because I could often come up with believable lies when people caught me hallucinating. I would say I thought someone had slipped me some drugs or that I was talking into a voice recorder in my pocket, things that at times were true but not at that time. It was hard not to be a liar when that sort of stuff is circling around in your head, so many unbelievable things seem to be so logically true. One of my big delusions was that a friend I had known in my apartment building was in reality Tom Cruise and that he wanted to adopt me as his brother like something out of one of his movies. When I think back to that time, I feel incredibly ashamed about the whole thing. Who can trust someone who does and says such things? Thanks to television, the general belief of the public is that people who are mentally ill are out to murder them, and their illnesses can be contagious. The funny thing is that the person suffering from the delusions knows in part of his head that they are false and is very confused and locked in a death struggle to find something to fix the jabberwocky in his or her head. I often believe it is no less than a miracle that no matter how far down I got, no matter how much I defied my doctors and the nursing staff they could somehow make me whole again and one day I could leave the hospital. This time out on the coast though, I feared my problems would not only take me back to the horrors of the mental hospital back home, but that it would leave me there forever.

While I was staying in that room, I had a pretty cool roommate who worked construction and he would talk to me and talk about his brother and soon I was hallucinating that he was my own brother come out to Vancouver to rescue me. Of course, riches and fame awaited me if I would just do some small thing. What really got to me once was being in my room and shouting or talking to myself and some guy came into my room and unplugged my clock radio, resetting it and walked out and then made jokes about me through those damn paper-thin walls.

I was to find out a number of years later that a very special female friend of mine who I had thought was going to try and help me through my problems and had cared about me, had in reality at that time considered me a psychopath, which is a condition that I was in no way even close to being. A psychopath is someone who is completely lacking in a conscience, someone who will murder people, purposely destroy their self-esteem and literally do things that most normal people would find horrendous, like jokingly start fires that cause extreme danger to others (though even for psychopaths this is rare) and won’t even feel bad about it. What I had was a psychotic delusion. A psychotic delusion is when a person’s mind is chemically altered and false ideas and delusions of grandeur and such occur. What gets me is when people find out I’m mentally ill and think I’m a psychopath when in reality, a person who is mentally ill is not only not necessarily a psychopath, but also much more likely to be a victim of violence rather than a perpetrator. Just the other day I was on a bus and saw a helpless older gent who talked to himself getting picked on by others and being terrified to the point where he begged the bus driver to call the police. Being mentally ill is still scary but far from being dangerous to those around the afflicted person.

As the story goes though, a few days passed, the people in the hostel seemed to have a fun time laughing at me and humiliating me and I finally made the decision I had to be in the hospital and that my medications simply were not working. With what I had left of money I bought a ticket on the bus headed back to Edmonton. One of the reasons I regretted my decision was that mental health treatment in North Vancouver was so much better than anything in Edmonton. Out there, when I was in the hospital, they actually paid a staff member to be a ‘buddy’ to me. He showed me around, talked to me. It was almost like having a servant, I don’t know how a hospital could afford such a thing. Then when I got out, they had some student nurse or possibly a Registered Psychiatric Nurse call me and check up on me and she seemed really nice. It was an ideal situation but somehow in my head I had these ideas that there were still women back home who were in love with me who were fabulously wealthy. In the back of my head though, in the sane part of my thinking, I missed my parents and friends. The sad reality was that I had been gone two years and my parents had had their fill of me, my friends had moved on and to this day I am not able to say whether any of those women had any kind of feelings for me.

One thing I did do as I was leaving my newfound home of North Vancouver, that I remember very clearly, was that as I was on the sea bus, the harbor ferry connecting the North Shore to Downtown Vancouver, I asked for and got permission to go into the control room and talk to the sea bus drivers. Somehow I managed to hold my words and thoughts together and I stood beside these kind men and helped them with a crossword puzzle as the dazzling skyline of Downtown Vancouver at night grew larger before me. It was breath-taking and for the first time ever I had a perfect front row seat.

I took what was to be my last ride on the skytrain (a computerized subway train run mostly on an elevated platform) boarded the cross-Canada bus after paying the last of what I had for the 1,300km journey to Edmonton, and kept trying to sleep through the ride but had a great deal of difficulty. So many thoughts were going through my head, so many mis-firing signals and invented realities. I had some acetaminophen with me and I would take a couple of pills and sleep for an hour or two then when I got up I would repeat the process. It was a dangerous game I was playing with my liver but the problem I had was that the medications I had been given by injection made me incredibly restless and edgy. There seemed to be no boundaries to my madness: any female was a young woman from my home town who was disguised and watching me to see if I was doing the right thing. Any male who roughly fit the looks was really Oliver Stone who was spending his millions to get me the help I needed because I had somehow by telepathy written an Oscar winning script for one of his movies. Even seeing a bird on the highway or hearing a noise from the bathroom was some kind of spiritual signal for me to react to in some way. It was terrible really, and on top of it my poor diet was working away at my stomach. Food was part of the reason I wanted to go back home to Edmonton. I was so desperate to eat I did something I didn’t think I would ever do: I stole from a convenience store, just a small can of stew, but to me it was as bad as stealing the whole cash register. I was deathly afraid of being caught for that and when I saw pictures in the paper of thieves on surveillance cameras I was so convinced it was me that I actually contacted the police thinking I had to turn myself in.

It seemed to take such a long time for the bus to get to Edmonton. It took all night and much